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Overview
Lessons Without Limit is not just another book about school reform but a highly readable guide to transforming the entire experience of learning across a lifetime. Free-choice learning is all about what you choose to do in your learning time. We learn every day—at home, at school, at work, and out in the world, from books, in museums, watching television, hearing a symphony, building a model rocket. Our motivations and expectations change over our lifetime but learning never stops. This book will give you a new understanding of the learning process and guide you in maximizing your lifelong learning journey. Visit the authors' web page
Synopsis
This book offers a new understanding of the learning process and guides us in maximizing our lifelong learning journey.
Library Journal
Families on vacation explore museums. Retirees enjoy the opportunities provided by Elderhostel. Teens surf the Internet. School kids come home from a day of learning and plop down to watch Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, or the Food Network. Learning is rapidly becoming the single most important leisure activity in our society. Free-choice learning occurs when people control what, when, where, and with whom they learn. As illustrated above, it can be done through TV or radio, books, museum exhibits, conversations, or the Internet. Falk and Dierking (Learning from Museums), founders of the Institute for Learning Innovation in Annapolis, MD, focus their latest work on lifelong learning, which requires possessing the skills, commitment, and capacity to learn throughout one's life. After explaining the hows and whys of learning, they take the reader on a journey through the learning process at each stage of an individual's life. While this is interesting reading, the best part of the book is saved for last, when the authors suggest how to reform American education to make their vision of a 21st-century learning society a reality, in part by integrating free-choice learning options into the lives of all citizens through a lifetime learning budget and a network of learning coaches. Their goals may sound idealistic, but they offer practical, down-to-earth advice. Recommended for academic and most public libraries.-Terry Christner, Hutchinson P.L., KS Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
Education Review
The authors’ enthusiasm for their vision permeates the book. It is written in an engaging and popular style with many personal anecdotes and examples. . . . Their vision is based on considerable study. This is an inspirational and idealistic book, filled with wonderful examples of informal learning experiences and environments. The authors hope to inspire everyone to engage in free-choice learning and certainly succeed in getting the reader to think about all the possibilities beyond the school and beyond the school years where learning can take place. While not a practical, how-to book, it fosters a way of thinking about learning that expands the educational horizon. For the teacher and student teacher, the book offers a panorama of possibilities for engaging students through activities outside the classroom. For home-schoolers, the book offers both support and inspiration. For anyone interested in lifelong learning, Lessons Without Limit offers an ideal toward which society can aspire.— Carla A.Hendrix
Muse
The strength of Lessons Without Limit: How Free-choice Learning is Transforming Education is in its interweaving of broad examples of individual stories and experiences with sound research based on both theory and experience, offering both challenges and direction. It is highly readable, timely, and should be a must read for educators, curators, exhibition designers, marketers, and, most importantly, directors and leaders.Museum News
Today the fundamental issue facing museums has shifted yet again. We no longer must decide if museums are educational institutions, but what educational role museums play in our increasingly diverse and sophisticated communities. With Lessons Without Limit: How Free-Choice Learning Is Transforming Education, John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking ask us to change the way we view education in America and in the process provide a vision for the role of museums and other educational institutions in the country's future. . . . Thirty years from now . . . this book by Falk and Dierking may well be seen as a catalyst in the next transformation of museums as educational institutions.— Jim S. H. Hakala
Museumnational
This book will be useful for managers charged with the responsibility of setting long-term goals for museums, galleries, zoos, gardens and other educational institutions and would arm them with a number of powerful reasons in arguing for increased resourcing for free-choice educational institutions. It will also be valuable to educators who wish to step back and review the big educational picture as they map out future plans. It is a great source of anecdotes for those who wish to illuminate academic educational points with real life examples.— Simon Langsford
The Informal Learning Review
Falk and Dierking's Contextual Model of Learning provides a practical framework to use when designing an informal (OK, free-choice) learning program. The book includes a wealth of guidelines for carefully considering each dimension (personal, social, physical) of their model. In brief, I highly recommend this book to parents, educators, and others interested in education outside the classroom.— Robert L. Russell
Visitor Studies Today
There is now a deep understanding of the learning process and how to best facilitate it, however, the practices in many educational settings lag behind this knowledge, and the recognition and valuing of other learning settings and experiences is minimal. This book will help to alter this situation and to raise the profile of the free-choice learning component in all our lives.— Janette Griffin, University of Technology, Sydney